San Francisco Board of Supervisors

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is the legislative body of the consolidated City and County of San Francisco, California, and acts as both city council and county board of supervisors. Because San Francisco has been a single city-county since 1856, the board sits beside a mayor who is also the county executive. It has eleven members, each elected from a geographic district to four-year terms, with a limit of two successive terms, and a board president chosen from among them. Its electoral method has been disputed: district elections were enacted by Proposition T in 1976 and first used in 1977, a result that brought Harvey Milk onto the board, before the city returned to at-large elections after the 1978 assassinations of Milk and Mayor George Moscone, and district elections were restored in 2000 and instant-runoff voting adopted in 2004. The board controls only a small fraction of the roughly nine billion dollar city budget freely, because legal restrictions and voter set-asides bind most spending.